Consumer-electronics devices are capable of connecting to remote devices such as data servers over the Internet and retrieve data files on demand. Electronic devices come in a variety of forms, including “headless” or “input-limited” devices, which may not have certain input/output components such as a display, keyboard, touchscreen, or similar components.
Speech-recognition systems have progressed to the point at which humans can interact with computing devices using their voices. Such systems employ techniques to identify the words spoken by a human user based on the various qualities of received audio input. Speech recognition combined with natural-language understanding processing techniques enable speech-based user control of a computing device to perform tasks based on the user's spoken commands. The combination of speech recognition and natural-language understanding processing techniques is referred to herein as speech processing. Speech processing may also involve converting a user's speech into text data, which may then be provided to various text-based software applications.
Speech processing may be used by computers, hand-held devices, telephone computer systems, kiosks, and a wide variety of other devices to improve human-computer interactions.